Freeze The Fear - I'd Rather Not

One night recently when my son couldn’t sleep, we felt the need for some mindless television and ended up watching Freeze The Fear with Wim Hof into the wee, small hours.

I had heard of Hof before. We sell his book at work and I follow several people on Instagram who have gravitated from wild swimming, which I can understand to throwing themselves into barrels of icy water, which I cannot. They always cite Wim Hof as the reason they want nipples like chapel hat pegs. That alone is enough to make me turn away. Nipples should largely be not seen and not heard in my opinion. I’m no Mary Whitehouse but I just don’t see the point of turning them into a feature.

But compelled by sadness and lack of sleep, we found ourselves glued to the television while the mad, Dutch bastard jumped about the icy tundra dressed in some kind of Peruvian carpet and flip flops while Holly Willoughby and an increasingly bemused Lee Mack coerced a bunch of questionable celebrities into a sub zero Italian lake.

Hof seems genuinely impervious to the cold. He is also impervious to noise pollution, hence my friend Emma’s remark: ‘Use your indoor voice, Wim’, which sadly went unheard by Wim due to the fact that he was leaping out from behind a glacier, shrieking encouragement at a freezing, Welsh weatherman at the time.

He seems like a nice man, despite his enthusiasm for running about in the snow, bellowing like an injured moose. He has, without a doubt, turned his own life around and certainly seems to be helping a lot of people do the same with theirs. There are two, key elements to his method, as far as I could tell when I wasn’t mesmerised by all the hooting and poncho wearing.

The first is breathing. Do we really need to think about breathing, given that it is something we do every day and if we stop, whatever we thought was bad, generally gets worse?

I hate to agree with Wim, but yes, we do. As a reluctant adopter of yoga due to being a post-menopausal woodlouse woman, I have to tell you that yoga breathing is terrifyingly powerful stuff that can help you do frankly amazing things with your body, but also dredges up a lot of shit in your mind. Yes, you might really want to learn how to become a human pretzel and go round casually sticking your big toe in your ear to get the boys, but also be prepared to do a lot of snotty crying and dealing with your issues en route.

And yoga breathing is what Hof is largely doing. He also seems to be doing a lot of yoga, yoga to be fair. As when he isn’t plunging an ex-Eastenders’ actress into a giant vat of ice cubes, he’s usually leaping into the air, doing the splits and landing on both testicles on the ice below, just for lols.

No wonder he does a lot of bellowing.

The second part of his method is all about learning to enjoy being half frozen to death, in a positive, can do way. He claims that when we get very cold it makes us feel very, very alive.

Shortly before it kills us.

It seems there is a fine line and a lot of it is ‘do not try this at home,’ despite the fact that he is always suggesting you can unplumb the bath, fling it into the garden and go wild with the ice maker on your fancy, American fridge before donning a nose clip and plunging in.

I am sure that the feeling of having narrowly escaped death every morning as I stand under a freezing cold shower, thinking about my life choices, will lend a certain pizzazz to proceedings and certainly make the rest of the day seem more manageable, but honestly, I just can’t.

Now this may mean that I am not mad enough, bad enough or desperate enough. So that’s quite cheering in a weird, unhealthy way. It certainly means that I am lazy and prefer low level ennui and a river of cynicism running through my veins to an icy wake up call to the rest of my life.

Would I want to be that alert and awake? I’m not sure that I would, if I am brutally honest. Once I’d started down that route, I’d only have to continue. It would be impossible to go back to the life of indifferent sloth, hot water bottles and a dependency on chocolate biscuits that borders on troubling.

I’d even, maybe, turn into a morning person, or even worse, a poncho person and no matter how robust it might make my mental health I don’t think the world is ready for me to do that yet.